Eerie desires for the authoritarian state. Covid-19 updates from Italy.
I have been – like anyone else in Italy – in quarantine for the past three weeks. Optimistically, Italy will be on lockdown for the next two…
Category: English
Thomas D. Zlatic and Sara Van Den Berg on Walter Ong’s Language as Hermeunetic
https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9781501714498/language-as-hermeneutic/ Maddy Adams: You are both professors of English, and this blog is an anthropology blog. Walter Ong’s work has traveled…
Book Review: The Meritocracy Trap by Daniel Markovits
In The Meritocracy Trap, Daniel Markovits argues that rather than aiding social mobility, the concept of meritocracy has become the single greatest obstacle to equal opportunities in the…
Social distancing in the times of coronavirus pandemic
By Bicram Rijal We are in the middle of a coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic with its effects reaching far deep and wide. While different measures are being thought about…
Momentaufnahme: Überlastete Covid-19-Untersuchungsstellen und die Koordination von Verdachtsfällen in Berlin (#WitnessingCorona)
Hide Press Release (2 Less Words) Rebecca Blome Zur Entlastung der Berliner Covid-19-Untersuchungsstellen hat die Charité eine App eingerichtet. CovApp bietet Menschen mit potenzieller Exposition zu C…
Frederic C. Schaffer, “Elucidating Social Science Concepts: An Interpretivist Guide” (Routledge, 2015)
For the third installment in our special series on interpretive political and social scientific research, Frederic C. Schaffer joins us to discuss his Elucidating Social Science Concepts: An…
Baptiste Brossard, “Why do We Hurt Ourselves? Understanding Self-Harm in Social Life” (Indiana UP, 2018)
Why does an estimated 5% of the general population intentionally and repeatedly hurt themselves? What are the reasons certain people resort to self-injury as a way to manage…
Matt Cook, “Sleight of Mind: 75 Ingenious Paradoxes in Mathematics, Physics, and Philosophy” (MIT Press, 2020)
Paradox is a sophisticated kind of magic trick. A magician’s purpose is to create the appearance of impossibility, to pull a rabbit from an empty hat. Yet paradox…
Causes of the 1853 Rogue River War
The first Rogue River War was a series of skirmishes and battles between mainly gold miners and the tribes. The miners had no regard for the tribes and…
How Do You Make a 2.4 Billion Dollar Observatory Disappear?
The Thirty Meter Telescope (TMT) is a next-generation observatory currently under development that has created a watershed moment for the scientific community and Hawaiian society. This is because…
Taking it Seriously: Comparing COVID-19 to malaria
The situation in which we now find ourselves in the privileged postcolonial West is a new one in the postwar period, but one that is more known to…
Lessons for self-isolation from chronically ill patients by Ritti Soncco
Since the first cases of Covid-19 were confirmed in the UK, the freedoms of movement, socialisation and conviviality that many of us take for granted have been radically…
Sorry, We’re Closed
The Delmar Loop, a stretch of what was once racialized as the “Delmar Divide” for the way it separates St. Louis’ population, is normally …
Watching Coronavirus in Kenya (#WitnessingCorona)
Hide Press Release (3 Less Words) Kennedy Mkutu Agade Here in Kenya the sun is shining and a beautiful breeze is blowing through the house. But the house…
exoticism, revolutionary tourism, solidarity
What does solidarity look like? There have not been enough in the way of critiques of revolutionary tourism, of the exoticist trap of romanticising rebel movements abroad while…
Reproductive rights in the time of COVID-19 by Cassandra Yuill
As the global pandemic escalates, health services are rapidly changing, creating tension between reproductive rights and safeguarding against COVID-19 spread, revealing the question: what is essentia…
Teaching the social determinants of health during the COVID-19 pandemic by David Ansari
I teach an undergraduate course called Cultural diversity, structural barriers, and multilingualism in clinical and healing encounters at the University of Chicago. The title is a mouthful, and…
The Scientific Sorcery of Radiocarbon Dating
Several years ago, I went back to Chicago to see some old friends: artifacts, really—ancient sandals to be precise. The sandals were at the Field Museum of Natural…
Links & Contents I Liked 359
Hi all, My weekly link review attempts on a modest scale to mirror key debates in the #globaldev community; so even though I included a special COVID-19 section again…
Silent Encroachments: Counting and grappling with Covid-19 in unequal Brazil (#WitnessingCorona)
Hide Press Release (2 Less Words) Moisés Kopper Life, as we know, has been abruptly disrupted. In Brazil, talk about the coronavirus and the mechanics of contagion and…
Waiting for a Dam #Roadsides
Once again, in November 2019, I found myself in an SJVN waiting room. But it was a new waiting room. Many things had changed in the two years…
Disasters and capitalism…and COVID-19. by Vincanne Adams
I recently participated in a radio talk show on the topic of disaster capitalism and the current COVID-19 pandemic. Is the COVID-19 pandemic a disaster? If it is, how…